A Call for Union
by Not-Going-To-Tell
Summary: RA3: Soviet Commander Axel is not having a nice day. His enemies are ignoring his fancy defenses, and his allies don't have enough brains to fill a thimble. A longwinded rant about the AI presented as a story chronicling a skirmish I recently played.


Disclaimer: I own a copy of Red Alert 3. I don't own the rights to the franchise though.

Authors note: After playing a skirmish where my AI partners were particularly stupid, I felt the urge to write this.

ooooooooooooooooooooooooo

It wasn't a good day, commander Axel, one of the union's best field commanders, thought.

An Empire commander had defected to the glorious Soviet Union, along with his own loyal troops....

Which apparently consisted solely of Impperial tankbusters and warriors.

You see, commander Axel had been commanded to escort this commander and his troops deep into union territory, so their superior scientists could disassemble and reverse engineer the addmitently impressive Japanese weapons. This was slightly annoying because they had been followed by two other Japanese commanders. To compound the problem, and allied commander had somehow been able to infiltrate their borders with a small force of his own. These three commanders had apparently put aside the fact that they were also at war with each other so they could assault the Union's glory. The only bright spot in Axel's mind was that the attractive commander Zhana had also been assigned with this babysitting mission.

The battlefield was both ends of a strangely small land bridge between two medium sized lakes. Since he was already in the Union's territory, the young Soviet commander had procured a vast reserve of resources from civilians in the area before drafting them and sticking them in tanks. Immediately upon starting the skirmish he started gathering ore from three nodes and took an oil derrick, along with a drydock and a hospital to tend to his men. He had managed to build up his base and create a defensive line before the problems started.

It seemed that the allied commander had taken slight to his very existence. Wave after wave of attackers came across the lake at him. The first had been one of the most dreaded in the allied arsenal, the Vindicator. The #$% thing had hit his command center on its first run, preventing him from sending any commands more advanced than "move ALL YOUR FORCES here" to his allies. Which really grated on his nerves when he noticed that Zhana had been producing a dozen bullfrogs, despite not needing them for their anti-air or troop transport capabilities. And they were randomly rolling around her base, doing nothing, while he was attacked by allied jet after jet, as well as suicide drones from those Empire fools.

Around five minutes later he was both flustered and flattered. His enemies had managed to secure the highest level of clearance for weapons to use against him. Which meant he now had to worry about his defensive line spontaneously being turned into brittle ice sculptures, being hit with a timebomb the size of a tank that was impossible to defuse, paradropped bombs that would only fall faster if shot down, or an allied century carpet bombing him at the worst possible times.

ooooooooooooooooooooooooo

"Commander! Our defensive line has been shattered!"

"What?!? How?!? We had sentries, flack and even Tesla Coils set up! It would take far more than a few tanks to freak through!"

"The line was literally shattered sir. The allied commander has access to a freeze beam in space. After our position was frozen, a single man with a shotgun shattered our men!"

"Well this day gets better and better doesn't it..."

ooooooooooooooooooooooooo

Meanwhile his funds were running low, and his allies had decided to send hundreds of conscripts and warriors to their death because tanks apparently cost too much for their single ore node incomes. Actually, the Japanese defectors had made several dozen one man submarines and a torpedo boat, which may have come in handy if the enemy had decided to either build a navy or construct anything on water, which they didn't. Zhana on the other hand, had mass produced bullfrogs and some sickles, which wouldn't stand up to anything with better than a machine gun, if they had ever been sent out of her base.

Despite the fact that his allies had roughly the intelligence of a hamster between them, Commander Axel pressed forwards...

Or at least he tried.

ooooooooooooooooooooooooo

"Commarade!" one of Axel's underlings yelled, "The allied commander has set up a time bomb underneath our V4 rockets and sickles while you were focussed on the Apocalypse tanks!"

"******! Order them to move, NOW!"

A loud explosion could be heard from where his men were advancing.

"We've lost all our sickles and 3 of our 5 V4s!"

"Continue advancing! We WILL destroy those dogs before they pick us apart!"

ooooooooooooooooooooooooo

Because of a few nasty surprises that were waiting for his forces, the young commander lost his assault force. Because his enemies kept bombing his forces before they were deployed and his allies weren't making any noticeable contributions to the battle, it took the commander another 20 minutes, several super weapon strikes, dropping 5 satellites on enemy positions and the loss of several thousand credits worth of defences to get a strike force out of his base. A group of 5 superheavy tanks, it didn't seem that they would be able to do that much damage to his enemy's bases, since the opposition had been stockpiling weapons with nigh impunity this entire time, and even a single helicopter could stop his plan in its tracks. His allies, as usual, were sitting in their bases, neither of which had been attacked, stocking up on units that wouldn't be useful against the things that the enemy could send their way at this point in the conflict.

Of course, it seemed that despite all his enemies' weapons and power, his five tanks were able to destroy two of the enemies within a minute. The last, cut off from his allies and with the Soviet Union's finest soldiers bearing down on him, put up a reasonable defence before being crushed by those same 5 tanks.

Reportedly one of the commander's assistants had to physically restrain him from ordering all his troops to kill the commanders who had lent so little aid in the battle.

Also reported was the fact that he asked communications officer Dasha for an easier mission the next time, like attacking Washington, or Tokyo, preferably with academy comarade Oleg at his side.

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A/N:Stupid and badly written, I know. But I had to vent. Events described above actually happened to me, and since the AI on my side seemed about thirty IQ points lower than my enemy's, despite the fact that they were the same difficulty, never improving their income at all. It wasn't until the last five minutes or so of the game, by which point I was eating the opponents for breakfast, that either of them thought that making tanks was a good idea. I wouldn't have minded if my allies had been killed, if they could just have taken a few shots in my place....


End file.
